


how light carries on

by limerental



Series: Long on the Road [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Epistolary, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, HIV/AIDS, Life After Loss, M/M, Minor Character Death, Past Character Death, Terminal Illnesses, brief mention of addiction, finding love again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:34:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26346439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Heard your song in some shithole diner today. The one you wrote in ‘74 and were so proud of and were so pissed over. Everyone knew the song but never your name. Heard it and just walked out, didn’t wait for my food. I just walked out and went and sat in the truck. I kept your guitar in the truck for a year after and then I gave it to Ciri for Christmas and god, she cried, I thought I’d fucked up good. Don’t know if she still has it. Last time you played it we were on the rocks in Maine and you had a bit of blueberry pie at the edges of your mouth and I kissed it off later or maybe the last time was at a rest area picnic table somewhere on the road again, somewhere going West, somewhere before Denver. You didn’t play in the truck too often because the acoustics were weird, and you learned to like the song of the rumble strips. You sang along to them sometimes, the melody flat and humming, lyrics spun up off the cuff, and those are the songs I catch myself singing, miss you singing them, miss you, miss all of it. I’m afraid I’m losing pieces of you one faded memory at a time. I’ll never stop missing you,he wrote.--Jaskier dies in 1990. Geralt lives.sequel to Long on the Road
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon/Original Female Character(s), Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Long on the Road [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914469
Comments: 35
Kudos: 137
Collections: Best Geralt, Regis Rocks





	how light carries on

**Author's Note:**

> **content warning** please mind the tags & warnings! this fic deals with the aftermath of the loss of someone with a terminal illness and includes detailed descriptions of hospitals, sickness, death, grief, and mourning, plus aging/old age. also descriptions of hate crime-related assault and minor character death. brief mentions of addiction, drug use, childbirth, period-typical homophobia, homophobic speech, and internalized homophobia. let me know if any other warnings may be helpful to others. please do not overlook these notes.
> 
> please forgive any anachronisms or mistakes in geography!

  
[ _With shortness of breath_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3lWwMHFhnA)   
[ _you explained the infinite_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3lWwMHFhnA)   
[ _How rare and beautiful_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3lWwMHFhnA)   
[ _It truly is to even exist_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3lWwMHFhnA)

“Listen,” said Ciri, tapping the chipped ceramic of a tea saucer with a peach lacquered fingernail. She startled him every time he met with her again, always forgetting that his vision of a braided, owlish, tafetta-soft girl existed only in his memory. She looked womanly now. She rented an apartment with her partner in Boston on the top floor of an old, brick house and was studying law. She looked like Yen in the set of her jaw, the twist of her frown.

“Listen,” said the woman who had been a little girl just a blink ago. “You have to talk about it. To someone. Even if you just write it down. Write it down and burn it or something I don’t know.”

“Who says?” grunted Geralt, feeling too big for the wooden, fold-up chairs that cluttered the corner dining table in her apartment’s minuscule kitchen. His knees brushed the underside of the table. His milk-white tea sat unsipped in a thrifted teacup. He didn’t know how to go about drinking tea. The linoleum floor was peeling around the edges. A spider plant dangled its tendrils over the sink, blocking out the evening light from the little window, and Geralt knew the mother plant lived in Yen’s kitchen.

Ciri carried pieces of the both of them wherever she went, just like Geralt carried the princess-pink image of her. Did she startle the same way when she saw him again? Forgetting a moment that he would arrive no longer the unwrinkled, dark-haired, laughing daddy of her childhood. Half-expecting him to sweep her in his arms and spin.

“Please, Dad, you have to talk about it,” said Ciri in her little kitchen, teacup pressed to her lips, blowing steam that fogged her round-moon glasses. “You have to talk about him to somebody.”

“Ok,” said Geralt even though he didn’t know how, he didn’t know what to say, who to say it to, how to shape the fragments into something that didn’t cut. He didn’t know how to look directly at the pieces-parts of Jaskier that he carried along with him. He didn’t know how to make any of it mean anything at all. He didn’t know a thing except go on, keep going, put the truck in gear, keep driving, keep going on.

* * *

_March 12th, 1991-  
  
J,_

_Ciri asked about my writing, and I said I was trying and now have to not make a liar of myself. Am outside Tucson right now, low 80s and weather looks like it might turn. Been a while since I sat through a good desert thunderstorm and am parked out on the side of the highway for the night, no one for miles, and I can see it coming from a good ways off. Can’t tell if it will miss me or not. You would have had a lot of pretty things to say about it I bet, but to me, it’s just noise and rain and mud. We never spent any time in the desert because you said you’d already been and it was-- sorry Ciri. Can’t do this. Sorry. sorry_

_-G_

_P.S. - It did storm. All noise and rain and mud. But a rainbow after, the sky all black, the desert baking back to orange. You would have said that way better than I can. Hate it. Hate that you aren’t here._

> * * *

In a dingy, corner bar in Provincetown, the oldest gay establishment on the street but not the only one by half, Renfri watched some old guy pull up a stool at the bar, settling into the cracked leather. He was a greyed ponytail and denim on denim and scuffed cowboy boots, wallet pulled out of a patched breast pocket, indent of a box of cigarettes in his jeans.

Renfri liked this place for its dingy, grimy pallor, for the squeak of its jukebox and stick of its groaning floorboards. It made her feel old and timeless, older still when the bartender didn’t even bother looking at her fake id, just poured her a splash of scotch and let her pretend not to gag over it. She could be out dancing in a pound and crush of bodies somewhere, and some nights she was. But she liked to feel old sometimes.

The old guy ordered a whiskey, neat, and then another before he had touched the first. He pinched the second glass between his fingers and set it at the empty place beside him, as though he was waiting for somebody else to show and take a seat on that stool. He tipped his glass against the other for a wordless toast.

“Who’s that for?” Renfri asked as she stepped near, because she was eighteen and deadly curious and she knew another runaway when she saw one.

The old guy startled, not expecting to be spoken to, not expecting her standing so close when he looked up. He touched the breast pocket that held his wallet, lips pursed, and then seemed to make up his mind and took it out, careful fingers tugging out the square of a wrinkled Polaroid. He pressed it flat on the surface of the bar, uncreased and unfolded and gestured her closer.

The sepia patina of the worn photograph showed two men on a boardwalk, the distant rim of the ocean behind them. One of the men was the old guy maybe a decade younger, hard to tell, and the other was shaggy-haired and lanky in cut-off shorts, freckled and grinning.

The old guy tapped his finger against the image of the young man, once, twice. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Renfri looked at the smiling, younger version of the old guy and thought maybe she knew the story already. In the short time she’d been on her own and out in the world, she’d heard plenty like it before. Too many just like it. She was young and the end of the century was approaching and her generation was faster and louder than the ones behind her, but she wasn’t ignorant. She’d heard the stories.

“Used to be a long-haul trucker,” said the old guy, thumbing the rim of his whiskey glass, tapping the photograph, “In spring of ‘85, I picked up a hitchhiker. Didn’t do hitchhikers.”

It was the first time Geralt told the story.

It wasn’t the last time.

* * *

Though he did not retire to Big Sur in a nut-brown house out in the rocky hills as he had always imagined, he did take up in a beach house on Cape Cod, peach clapboard rising among the marshland flats and sweeping dunes. The sun burned the sand orange every evening, and he stood barefoot out on the back deck with his hands in his pockets. Just looking out to sea.

Some moments, he mistook the touch of his lover coming up behind him as that of another man from long ago. He thought of his old fantasy. Of Jaskier going freckled from the sun, wrinkling and sagging and starting to look weathered in ways he never got a chance to, the way that Geralt and his lover did now.

They went on to bed as the dusk greyed along the dunes and the lip of the coast. Met one another in an embrace, felt the softness of their bodies given up to time.

The old, worn photographs settled in a shoebox in the back of a closet. Old friends came to visit here and there, book clubs and dinner parties, stragglers and strays, always an extra seat at the table and room for a new family member related by more than blood. There were pride parades and community center small group meetings and memorial after memorial, each one more vibrant than the last, each one more bright and loud in their collective grief.

And then, it was his turn to lean on a shabby railing looking out to the ocean horizon and stare at the inevitability of his own inescapable death.

The end of the road.

How grateful he was, how much he saw in his life that he owed to that brief, golden blip in time.

A community and a daughter and a family and a purpose. A story worth telling. An ease to his isolation. The knowledge that he was worthy of this love and this life, growing old and quiet in the big house at the edge of the sea.

He had lived. He had lived.

The lot of it faded with the tender fragility of memory, sweeping in and out like the tide.

* * *

He recalled those last days in bits and pieces, fits and starts, great white swathes of nothing and bursts of violent color.

The red sun setting over the mountains. Pale lips cracking over a whispered song. Didn’t remember which song it was, the very last one. The sick and hum and buzz and ammonia stench blurred into one beast, a foam-frothed wave that drove him under.

The hospital in Denver arranged for the body to be sent home. Nobody told him much. Not next of kin so they couldn’t say too much at all.

A miracle they’d even let him curl on a cot in the room those last few weeks, grunting that they were _brothers, he’s my brother_ , even though no one believed a word of that. Not through the kissing of his hands and wiping of his brow and the way Geralt slept most times crammed into the bed, shrugged down low so that Jaskier could breathe easy as was possible. His legs dangling off, his head worried into the thin press of a sharpening hip bone.

A body could only endure so much. The virus pulled a single thread, and the rest unravelled. Tuberculosis, they said. Lungs like swiss cheese and full of water, he said, a poet to the end. Liquids tubed in and out, clear and then piss-brown. Kidney failure, they said. Lights out, he said. Dying was a process, one death after the other, one failing organ after another and then all at once. The only color in that face the spittle of blood on a stretched-thin smile.

A body could only endure so much, but it endured and strained toward life longer than was maybe right and just and fair. The body unravelled to a tumble of yarn. Death came one carrion pluck at a time and then all at once.

Geralt worried a denim jacket in his hands, crumpled and frayed.

* * *

  
_Think you took all the words worth writing with you_ , he wrote.

 _You told me about dead stars. How the light keeps on going,_ he wrote.

 _Passed through Erie. Thought about kissing you that first time. Shit, what a fuckin nothing dump of a town to do something like that,_ he wrote.

 _Heard your song in some shithole diner today. The one you wrote in ‘74 and were so proud of and were so pissed over. Everyone knew the song but never your name. Heard it and just walked out, didn’t wait for my food. I just walked out and went and sat in the truck. I kept your guitar in the truck for a year after and then I gave it to Ciri for Christmas and god, she cried, I thought I’d fucked up good. Don’t know if she still has it. Last time you played it we were on the rocks in Maine and you had a bit of blueberry pie at the edges of your mouth and I kissed it off later or maybe the last time was at a rest area picnic table somewhere on the road again, somewhere going West, somewhere before Denver. You didn’t play in the truck too often because the acoustics were weird, and you learned to like the song of the rumble strips. You sang along to them sometimes, the melody flat and humming, lyrics spun up off the cuff, and those are the songs I catch myself singing, miss you singing them, miss you, miss all of it. I’m afraid I’m losing pieces of you one faded memory at a time. I’ll never stop missing you,_ he wrote.

 _I knew I loved you when I saw you knee-deep in the water at Lake Michigan and you were freezing your tits and balls off, you idiot, and you were cursing at the wind, and that’s when I knew I loved you, you fucking idiot. I loved you. I love you,_ he wrote.

 _Fuck you,_ he wrote. _Fuck you._

* * *

He called Yen. The cradle of the hospital lobby payphone ached against his ear, scraped the wiry stubble on his cheek.

 _Come home_ , she ordered, and he imagined the warp of a sob twisting her lips and he imagined the little body in its coffin shipped away to San Francisco in the dark belly of a jet’s cargo hold. He imagined it limned in tumbling flowers at a quaint service. The sway of a breeze off the fogged coast.

There was no funeral, he learned later. No gravestone, though he searched for years. Trolling records and calling cemeteries and then just walking along the round of browned hills depressed with flat plaques looking for _Julian Julian Julian_. When his mother died a few years after him, his name was listed in the obituary as preceding her in death, and that was that.

In the end, his only memorial sprawled across the Washington Mall, his life woven into the great fabric of a singular tragedy, one body, one death. Dying was a community effort.

The hospital sent the body to his family. They said _home to his family,_ but that wasn’t right or true. The body was empty, unbound, threads loose, and his home was elsewhere.

Geralt had carved open his skull to let Jaskier nest deep in the grey matter of his brain, and that’s where he lived through the decades after. That’s where he rested. Memory after worn-thin memory. Not in some plot in a wind-swept field or in a glazed urn, whispered over by strangers.

He carried him on down the road.

* * *

[ _Tall tales we make up, our eyes on the road_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DHGG_lR9ts)   
[ _Nothing lasts forever, that's how it goes_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DHGG_lR9ts)

* * *

The first Christmas after, he was four months out from Denver and still raw as a flayed man.

He’d spent his fall home time in Vegas pissing away his cash like he was twenty-two again and had come out the other side of the war unscathed and reborn. If he opened his eyes real slow in the morning, he could stay in that weird, hazy place just this side of waking where he might fumble in the vanishing dark of the motel room and find Yen’s hand and feel out the solid edge of the new wedding band under the cusp of her knuckle.

Still called Yen every Friday from anywhere and everywhere. The desert blurred into the mountains into the plains. He charged across a Midwest bleak nothing fractured by tumbles of salmon clouds in a blinding, blue sky.

Every scrap of road held some memory, some moment they had spent together, and he could not look anywhere without seeing it. In five years, they’d slung their way from coast to coast, desperate to love one another as fast and as often and as expansively as they could. A bucket list of waterlines, of waves, of rapids, of babbling streams.

Jaskier on the edge of the water with his arms splayed, fingertips spread, head tipped back to accept the last kiss of the sunset on his flushed cheeks. How cliche to return again and again to that image, a metaphor he’d be proud of, even as the wretched gargle of last breaths still reverberated louder than anything. It rattled and echoed. Fading sunsets, final words, last healthy pink-cheeked moment.

When had he first started to look thin and tired? Geralt, trying not to look closely, hadn’t noticed.

Having Jaskier with him in the truck day after day meant it happened slow and subtle. It took him by surprise when he happened to glance at the Polaroid tacked to the padding of the cab, taken by a stranger one of their trips to Virginia Beach, and saw a man who was round-cheeked and hale and young in ways that Jaskier had not been in a long while. He had almost refused to ask to have their picture taken, had smiled only because Jaskier pouted and pinched him, had felt a deep thrill of fear to so publicly sling his arms around the man he loved in the bright glare of day.

Even so fresh, so soon, memory tripped and sputtered. When was the last time they had kissed with Jaskier bright-eyed and sunny? When was their last shared orgasm, his palm cupping the wet head of his erection, their breath intermingled? When had they slow-danced in a vacant lot with the craneflies fluttering in the glow of the Peterbilt’s headlights, some old love song crooning over the tinny speakers, their foreheads pressed together, hips swaying?

[ _I know I’ll never love this way again_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XNmZTqS_As), a woman’s sultry voice had risen into the dark, Jaskier mouthing along with no sound, crooked smile and too-long hair, but when and where? Had that been outside of Chicago, somewhere in Nebraska, upstate New York, or somewhere else entirely, before or after their last shared home time?

He didn’t want to forget. He desperately didn’t want to forget.

As the holidays approached, the rig chugged into New England long after the last leaves had shaken from the trees and the first few ice storms had plowed through and blackened gardens and roadside weeds to burnt husks. He parked in the terminal and stood hunched among a slush of old snow in the lot to wait to hear the growling engine of Yen’s Firebird.

Yennefer, bushy hair and leather jacket and heavy winter boots, swept out of the car and into his arms.

He held himself against her, lilac perfume and warm slip of a body. Small and neat and tidy in his arms. He’d loved her once and still did. He forgot that sometimes.

* * *

Yen had said _come home, come home, come home_. She’d said it so many times her throat ached raw before the words even left her mouth. She could have tried harder, she thought.

She met him miserable and wet-eyed and kitten-soft in the lot and picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dragged him home to her old farmhouse. She’d never fooled herself into thinking the farmhouse was his home, never quite let him settle enough to get comfortable.

She had warned him when all of it was fresh, when his voice first echoed tinny across the miles and years and said _he’s sick, Yen._ She could have been more insistent then, could have demanded and needled and guilted, and maybe things would have gone different.

The first fear that had clenched in her was that he’d get sick too, that she’d have to be the one to pick him up swinging in her jaw and worry over him and watch him fade out sudden as a filament snapping. But she’d focused past that in a blink to the bigger, meaner truth.

She’d seen this coming, freight train sure with Geralt splaying himself ragdoll on the tracks. Jaskier was always going to get sicker. Jaskier was always going to sputter out of the world.

Maybe if she’d tried a bit harder, she wouldn’t be speeding along dirt roads with one eye on her ex-husband pooled in the passenger seat of the Firebird. He looked boneless, like she’d tug open the door, and he’d spill out at her feet, like he’d lie there all night in her patchy front yard if she let him. He looked corpse-like, hallowed and grave-thin.

Skidding into the drive, they sat in the Firebird through a pregnant silence, engine cooling and ticking, giving up its heat to the December air. Geralt crooked his cheek against the door, breath ghosting the window. She cursed aloud and didn’t know what or who she was cursing. Her curses hit the still curtain of air in the Firebird but did not break it.

God, maybe, if He was up there. The road itself. The war. Time. Her stupid man and his big heart.

Not Geralt’s partner, no, not Jaskier. If Yen had ever cursed him in the past, she muttered an apology and a prayer. She knew she’d cursed him plenty when it was all new, before she’d met him. Thought he was a hustler and a scamp and a coward, not steady and brave enough to blink out of the world without dragging somebody good and devoted like Geralt down with him.

Yen had been wrong about Jaskier, had known that almost right away, had been as charmed by him as she was pleasantly irritated, and the worst of it was that she could count on one hand how many times she’d met him face to face. Four holidays, one late summer stay on the Vineyard. That was the sum of it. All her memories of him. All that was left.

She wondered if Geralt tallied moments like that. Five years. Just five years. Loose change.

She took back the curses one prayer at a time there in the drive, forehead pressed to the ridges of the steering wheel beside the bone-white grip of her knuckles. She listened to Geralt breathe like his lungs were full of water and prayed and prayed.

 _I’m sorry for thinking you should have loved somebody else’s husband_ , she did not say aloud. _But you should have, you should have, you fucking should have._

Geralt wavered when he stood in the drive but did not puddle at her feet, and she let the screen door slam behind them as they entered the house, logs crackling in the fire, Ciri stood at the stove stirring hot cocoa in a pot, shoulders swaddled in a quilt. Her partner, Missy, pressed a hand against her lower back, chin tucked into her shoulder.

“Hi dad,” said Ciri, smiling tight and sad.

Yen remembered her as a wisp of a girl stretched thin and terrified, her shaky whisper of _Mom, there’s a girl. There’s this girl._ Yen never felt like enough of a mother, and especially not then, falling flat on the important stuff, fumbling over those moments of comfort and reassurance.

But then, her ex-husband brought a man home for the holidays, something loosened and new in him, and he came up with the words that Yen hadn’t managed. She’d never thanked Jaskier for that. She’d never thought to say _you woke something up in him and shook him out and rearranged him._ She’d cursed for years over Geralt not being enough of a father, not present, not there, only to look round and find that he had had a crash course on courage and sentiment and hanging on tight to the things that fucking mattered.

Missy and Ciri entangled their hands, brave as anything.

 _Thank you_ , thought Yen in her little kitchen, the spider plant swaying over the kitchen sink, the tile countertop reflecting the glow of the fireplace in the next room, her hand hovering between Geralt’s quivering shoulders, her daughter engulfing him on tiptoe in her arms. Brave as anything. _I owe you for this. You rearranged us. You bolstered and brightened us. You were the best of us. You’ll live on right here in these bodies, in this embrace, in these people. We’re the only bits and pieces left of you. Thank you, you little idiot, you squawking, silly little man. I owe you for this._

Ciri doled out hot chocolate and the lot of them bundled up near the fire and settled into the whispering groan of the house, feeling out the dark, horrible void of the man who wasn’t with them this year. Not daring to speak into it.

She took Geralt to bed. Not like that, not husband and wife and not ever again, but face to face on her big, chilled mattress with the rough quilt up to their chins and breathing one another’s air. No words exchanged, not touching except where their hands locked between them on the pillows, not daring to reminisce aloud.

Many years later, the fracture less like a fresh-shattered bone and more like a fault line that trembled sometimes, he called and said without preamble, “remember that night you took us both to bed.”

“How could I forget?” she said and laughed. Her bedside lamp warmed the big, empty bedroom of the farmhouse. She could close her eyes and imagine him with his face pressed against the tendrils of rain streaked on the glass of a must-heavy phonebooth, even though she knew he wasn’t calling from phonebooths anymore. He had an apartment to call from now, even had a cell phone.

“He thought you were joking,” said Geralt over the line, a hundred miles away.

“No, he didn’t. He thought it was funny, but he knew I wasn’t joking.”

“You kissed him.”

“I kissed him.”

“I thought I was having a stroke,” he said.

“You getting off to it right now or something, old man?” she teased and remembered it, the mattress too small and too loud with Ciri sleeping just next door, giggling over the squeak of the springs and shushing and swearing. Chilled goosebumps, the taste of white wine in their foolish, fumbling kisses.

“That was the only time we did that,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Was he a good kisser?”

“What kind of question is that? You kissed him more than I ever did.”

“But you kissed him too. You remember it. Somebody else remembers what it was like to kiss him. I’m afraid that-- shit, Yen. I’m old. I’m getting old.”

“Yeah.”

“He was here.”

“Yeah, darling, he was.”

“Was he a good kisser?”

“Yeah,” Yen said, though she didn’t really remember. She’d been drunk. Time shrank her memory to fuzzy-edged glimpses. Time yawned away from them, softening and settling. “Yeah, he was.”

* * *

  
Every family Christmas afterward, once talking about it didn’t cut like glass rising up from their throats, somebody brought out a glass and a bottle of something strong and made some toast.

The first year, just a few months out, it was wordless and strained, glasses tipped in silence.

But their little family found words.

“To your abysmal fashion sense. God, that man couldn’t wear anything that didn’t make my eyes bleed.”

“To that song you wrote about masturbation. Still gets stuck in my head and I always forget where I am and sing it out loud.”

“To your terrible, terrible haircuts. If you were here, bet you’d still have a mullet. No, fuck, worse, you’d have gone bleach blond. You’d have frosted tips. God.”

“To your stupidity and your blind courage. To your really bad knock knock jokes. To your off-rhymes and your catchy refrains. To your bullshit and your honesty. We owe you, songbird.”

Ciri’d been petrified when she first stumbled off to college and found the world to be bizarre and heavy and confusing. More confusing still when she met Missy in her philosophy class her sophomore year, all full lips and bright eyes and cock of her hips, the shadows falling heavy on her dark skin as they leaned against one another at one party or another, her mouth whispering against her collarbone.

She’d been scared and excited and overwhelmed, Missy’s hand slipping between her legs, her hair tickling her nose. Pushed her away, fled, hid out through the rest of the semester buried in final papers and studying, hiding, fleeing.

And then, winter break. And then, her daddy brought a man home for the holidays.

Too bright, too loud man who flaunted and preened and told her it was ok to love anyone, everyone, with as much enthusiasm and exuberance as anyone could manage.

She went back to campus in February and met Missy head on, terrified and proud.

Ciri didn’t know he was sick until a few years in. She’d known something was up, her mom pursing her lips around telling her, constant prodding finally spilling the dark and terrible secret loose. He hadn’t wanted her to know, said Mom. Didn’t want her to look at him different.

Next time she saw him, after she knew, she did look at him different, deep as she could, careful as she could.

“Aw hell, kiddo,” he’d said when she asked, matter of fact and pretending to be brave, how long he had left.

One Christmas many years on, after their toasts, Missy touched her hand and nodded, and Ciri cleared her throat. The family’s eyes turned to them. She dredged up all her courage. She took a breath and let it loose.

“We’ve been trying for a family,” said Ciri, wet smile crinkling. “And Missy’s seven weeks.”

Next Christmas, there was baby Julian, dark halo of hair and brown, wrinkly skin and grey eyes, swaddled and whining in Geralt’s big hands.

One Christmas, finally, finally, she spun in her daddy’s arms beneath a crystal chandelier that shattered prisms of light over their white hair and her white dress and the white marble dance floor, their great mass of loved ones hushed while they swayed together. Never thought she’d see him in a tux. Never thought she’d get to call Missy her wife, legal and solid, proud and promised.

Ciri leaned her head against her daddy’s shoulder and imagined herself nineteen years old and vibrating out of her skin. She imagined a world where her daddy hadn’t learned to be brave. The cold, numb reek of her fear going on and on, unsoothed.

“To those who can’t be here today,” she said, standing tall at the head table with champagne flute held up in a gleam of fracturing, colorful light, and the whole room swelled in crescendo to echo her.

* * *

>   
_November 2nd 1998 -_

_Resigned today, can you fuckin believe it? Thought I’d die hunched up here in the seat, that they’d have to pry my fingers off this old wheel. But the industry’s gone to shit, Jask, sad to say it. They’re sayin in a year or so they’ll have us loggin miles on a computer. No more fudging numbers. It’s different out here. It’s faster and meaner. My bones are too damn old. I put her in the terminal for the last time this morning and said goodbye and am in Yen’s kitchen right now drinking her shit brandy. I’m running street sweepers now. Should keep me going. She got out the classifieds earlier, circling places for rent I might like and she’s going with me this week to look. I’ve never had an apartment, not really. Never had a home. Whole assload of shitty rooms all over and Yen’s place of course and the old Peterbilt. And you. And you and you and you._

_Yours,_   
_Geralt_

* * *

It was called Morhen Pub, the tired old bar down the road from his new place, manned by a veteran from an older war than ‘Nam who nodded stiffly at him and slumped dozing behind the bar most of the time. The place hadn’t been intended as a gay bar and wasn’t advertised as such, but the community had built itself up around it, now conveniently positioned between one bathhouse and the other, the leather club down the next alley, the book store at the end of the street whose rainbow colors flapped wildly.

The grizzled owner probably wasn’t a queer, but he opened his doors to any and all types, except bigots of course, who got tossed out on their faces in the gutter. The place was quiet and subdued, only got a little rowdy on Thursday trivia nights, usually had sedate oldies whining on the jukebox and a dozen or so patrons tucked at their own tables or swinging their legs on barstools.

Yen had chosen the apartment on this particular street for him and smiled a secret smile, thinking herself so hilarious, so very funny. Honestly, Geralt didn’t think too much about whether or not he was homosexual, not anymore. It used to terrify him like nothing else. He knew what it must have looked like to the people who noticed, him travelling with some fruity little guy who bounced down out of the cab at truck stops with a twirl and a playful click of his heels.

He only kissed Jaskier under the cover of darkness. He never held his hand.

But the times were changing quicker than he could quite grasp hold of, and he saw young men now strolling arm in arm, kissing on the streets, holding flags over their shoulders like a shared cape and kissing blatant and proud, kissing in deep, bedroom ways that touched a blush on his cheeks. The times sure were a-changin’, and maybe he couldn’t keep up.

And Geralt had loved Yen, had liked sex with Yen and liked it with other women, so he didn’t think homosexual fully fit the way it did for some of the others he shared drinks with.

Some of them propositioned him, eyes hooded, voice dipped low, and he grunted and made himself be polite about telling them no. He thumbed the edge of his wallet in his breast pocket. He hadn’t had any sex at all since--

 _You’re a fuckin’ widow,_ he thought and huffed a laugh into his glass of whiskey and promptly sucked it down.

* * *

  
The new guy at the pub loomed large and strange, and gossip spread quick as usual, reaching Eskel’s ears before long. Silver-haired and hard but not pot-bellied and ruddy-nosed like your regular old drunk who sometimes stumbled in here not knowing what sort of bar it was. Eskel kept a wary eye on the new guy, waiting for his silence to bloom into crass slurring and then he’d get what was coming to him.

The stranger was called Geralt. He lived up the street, they said, in that one bedroom above the laundromat. Vietnam vet and used to be a trucker, all highway grit and toughness but didn’t say much. Lost a partner to AIDs, someone whispered. He’s one of us. Plenty good reason not to be too talkative.

Most knew Eskel as the big, brawny asshole with an ugly facial scar who frequented the leather club down the road. Among the vanilla rabble of the old bar most weekday nights, he dressed down, none of the usual studs or straps or little vests. Vesemir respected him the way he respected most ex-servicemen, with stiff nods and free beers sometimes, and Eskel returned that respect by not wearing chaps into his sleepy drinking establishment.

Nobody paid him to be a bouncer, but Eskel protected his own. Usually he could get dickheads running just by standing up nice and slow, stormy expression and twist of a sneer, letting his leather jacket creak over the bulk of his heavy shoulders.

The new guy loomed large and strange, and Eskel loomed right back.

“Not interested,” grunted the new guy.

“Neither am I,” said Eskel with a snort. “You’re not my type, sweetcheeks.”

Geralt grunted, eyeing him, beer bottle brought up to his lips and swigged back. He had that pinched, red-veined look of someone who hadn’t been sleeping well, white hair frizzing from the tie of his ponytail, wine stain bruises crowding his undereye. Eskel knew that look.

He’d had half a dozen buddies look at him like that, haunted and itchy and hovering on the outskirts of a society they couldn’t weave themselves back into. But this was different, fresher, less numbed by time. Been decades since the messy end of the war and most of those ghosts had settled if not gone to rest.

“Buy you a drink,” Geralt said finally.

“Now who’s interested?”

“V-C do that?” the stranger asked, blatant and direct, and Eskel grinned.

Some folks didn’t ask about the puckered twist of his cheek. Avoided even looking at it. Some folks got hot over it, going to their knees at his feet, and he’d hook his thumbs in the corners of their mouths like if they weren’t good he’d tear an echo of a scar into their own skin.

Geralt looked him dead in the face. He had similar scars, sure as anything. Hidden but just as ugly.

“Naw,” said Eskel. He’d brought plenty of nasty shit back with him from the war but not the scar. “Tipped my bike. Guardrail to the face.”

“Ouch.”

“Stung a bit.”

Might have scarred better, the doctors said, if he hadn’t been so fucking stubborn. If he hadn’t been proud of the burn of the wound, hadn’t refused skin grafts, hadn’t liked the ugly grimace of his torn lip. At least now he looked as ugly as he felt. At least if he burst awake in sweat and terror and rage, he could blink into the glare of the bathroom mirror and look as twisted as he felt.

He told Geralt that, later, and the fucker laughed. Neither of them had seen the ugliest slog and grit of the war; Eskel orbiting outposts and swelling up with mosquito bites and never firing a shot, Geralt running supply trucks out to fringe camps and facing down perilous enemies like big fucking puddles and downed branches.

And Geralt told him soon enough about the man he’d driven with to the edge of the world and back. About the sunsets and the ripple of the waves and the flat, endless expanse of road. How fragile it all was, how it felt to race headlong against mortality like you could cram a lifetime into a handful of loose change years. Like you could love somebody in fast forward, love them deep and true even as the virus lay in wait.

“Them’s some real pretty words, poet man,” Eskel slurred, knocking their glasses together, and Geralt went cross-eyed.

“Asshole,” he grunted. “Fuckhead.”

They’d found out they were the same age and both raised in different podunk towns in Maine, could have run into each other in Bangor when their moms took them department store shopping, missed each other in the jungle by half a year of deployment.

They bumped shoulders at the bar, looming together, and before long, Eskel started calling him brother like something sworn-in and deadly serious.

“Brother,” he said on a rain-slick, yellowed night, knocking their temples together, rapping his knuckles against the guy’s big ole forehead. Geralt only avoided punching him because he was piss-drunk and a little weepy. “Brother, you’ve got to live a little before you keel over and die. Get back out there.”

“Where?” he grunted.

_“There.”_

“Nothing left out there. I’ve been everywhere. Just places I can’t go back.”

“Shut it,” Eskel said, shaking him. “Shut the fuck up.”

He held him up and shook him, fist clenched in the back of his denim jacket. Almost lost his balance and launched them both into the empty road. His brother strained under an ochre streetlight, wispy-haired and tattered. Wet reflection of the street holding him like the promise of a coastline.

* * *

  
Lambert showed up one night piss-drunk and angry, looking for somewhere to vent it. Picked the wrong bar to holler a slur, may have gotten away with it somewhere that wasn’t so quiet and crammed full of vets. Vesemir jerked out of his snoring against the wall and tipped his chin to Geralt and then he had the weaselly man in a shuffling headlock, dragging him on out.

“Fuck you, fuck all of you,” the bastard howled when Geralt finally wrangled him out into the street.

“Shut up, it’s late,” said Geralt. “Quit fucking yelling. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“You shut up, you fuckin’ f--” The red-faced man thought better of using that word again, grimaced, tried to push himself away and almost fell right on his face. Geralt, wishing he wasn’t such a good fucking guy, resisted the urge to let him, catching him tighter around the shoulders. The guy slouched and shook his fist at the sliver of a moon rising over the white steeple of a clock tower and then vomited up all the booze he’d drank in a plume of foam onto the pavement.

“Go home,” said Geralt, shaking him. “Go the fuck home.”

“I can’t,” he whined and of course, of course, things tipped immediately south, and the guy burst into wet, hitching sobs. “I fucking can’t. He’s not-- he’s--”

He felt it rise in him as well, that cloying pain that never seemed to lose its edge. He didn’t always feel it so profoundly anymore, had been nine years since the end. Nine years goddamn it, almost double the years he’d been with Jaskier on the road. But sometimes, it welled up clear and sharp.

Geralt remembered the payphone in the hospital lobby. The wrecked and twisted quality of his voice, warped into something he barely recognized.

_I can’t. My home is where he is._

“What was his name?” he asked, rough voice sounding too loud on the midnight street. The guy shook his head, lips pursed, embarrassed and flushed and failing to fight back a fresh sluice of tears. He smeared at his cheeks with the back of a hand, succeeding mostly in punching himself in the face.

“Aiden,” he said, wobbly and lost and so pissed off it ached. Geralt eased them down to flop their asses on the brick-lined curb, a car or two splaying their headlights across the two men hunched on the edge of the sidewalk, flirty gaggles of young folks skittering past them from time to time. “His name was Aiden.”

“Jaskier,” echoed Geralt, and the guy looked at him, confused and frowning and watery-eyed. “Been nine years.”

He allowed the cadence of his voice to rise and fall among the city’s night sounds as he told the story. Somewhere, a train blew its whistle at a crossing, short and polite. The nearby highway roared in a distant hum of sparse traffic.

If he closed his eyes, he could pick out the rumble of the big rigs, guess at what they were hauling, where they were headed. Never used to drive through the night in the old days, just fudged the logbook if he had to drive too fast to keep time the next day. Now a lot of long-haulers rode in pairs and took shifts, swapping driver and passenger, passenger and driver. The thought of Jaskier propped up in the driver’s seat fiddling with gears made him feel like smiling. Fucking laughable.

He clasped the guy’s neck and shook him a little to keep him awake.

“There’s still a lot of road out there,” he said, cliche, stupid, laughable. Jaskier would slap his hand over how shit fucking trite that sounded or maybe he’d bend over his own knees and guffaw with laughter in that breathless way of his. “You keep driving. You tell his story to somebody someday. When you can.”

“I can’t,” said the guy, though just a few months later he did tell it.

The story of their boyhood, their friendship that was all saltwater taffy and lemonade and pond water, their teenaged mutual masturbation and nervous, guilty glances, their college days, Lambert’s cuss-heavy denial and Aiden’s sad, sweet, longing, and then the night that Aiden went out to the club with his buddies, all glitter and cocaine, all dewy and young and alive and that was the last of him, the end of him, found two days later in the swill of a back alley garbage heap, cracked open like an oyster and sucked dry.

“I can’t,” said Lambert and what he meant was _I can’t even breathe when he’s not-- when he can’t--_

“You can,” said Geralt, steady and still. He had managed it, somehow. Nine years ago he would have sworn on every holy thing he knew that his last breath would be Jaskier’s. He kept breathing. He’d pressed his thumb into the groove of the tendons in the fragile wrist and felt that last flutter and been sure of his own impending heart failure. It hadn’t happened. He kept on breathing.

“You can.”

* * *

  
_Spent Fourth of July at Eskel’s family’s hunting cabin, just the guys. Funny how well a bottle rocket can clear wasp’s nests from the eaves. The stars out here though, love. Fuck. Milky Way and all,_ he wrote.

 _Had to bail Lambert out again this morning. Indecent exposure. Pissin in the fuckin street in a wig and heels goddamn it. Sitting in a holding cell in fishnets and an off the shoulder dress fuck it all. Idiot. Stupid brave idiot. Reminds me of you,_ he wrote.

 _Lobster roll in Aquinnah as the sun set. Caught dawn this morning in Oak Bluffs over the water, first rays of sun, and drove out here this evening to the west side to watch the light fade. The sun rising from the water and sinking back into the water. You’d have something pretty to say about what any of that meant,_ he wrote.

 _Idiots threw me a surprise birthday party. Fifty-five. Senior citizen. Old as dirt. Cahir and Milva made a big grey cake shaped like a coffin, Lambert led a toast like reading an obituary, Eskel played at being weepy the whole damn night, Ciri gifted me hemorrhoid cream haha think they’re so fuckin hilarious. Regular goddamn comedians,_ he wrote.

 _Walked my daughter down the aisle this afternoon. Fuck. Fuck. You should have seen me in that tux. You should have seen her hair all done up and pretty. Fuck,_ he wrote.

 _Missy was in labor twelve hours and the doctor said it all went smooth, smooth as anything like that can go and he came out in the waiting area all smiles and said a boy, a boy. They’re calling him Julian. Can you believe that? Said it’s a coincidence. Family name on Missy’s side. Asked me if it was ok, and I swore I wouldn’t fuckin cry but can you believe it? Don’t think his eyes will stay blue. Full head of curly hair. Ciri’s callin me Pop Pop and Gramps and Pappy already, has been for months, all cheeky and wonderful. Wish you could have felt how soft the soles of his little feet are. How tight he can grip with his hands,_ he wrote.

 _I met someone,_ he wrote. _Been a few months. I think maybe you’d have liked him well enough. He’s not a single thing like you. I think… thank you. Never going to love anybody the way I loved you, but that’s just fine. That’s alright. It’s enough_.

* * *

  
The owner of the bookstore on the corner had a long, thin face with high cheekbones and bushy eyebrows and a hooked nose. His smiles were tight-lipped but genuine, his humor so dry Geralt choked on it. He was lanky as a shadow and had served as a medic in the war. His bookstore narrowed to a wedge on the corner, impossibly tall shelves organized by niche categories, the dusty air smelling like clove and sage.

Inexplicably, Geralt found himself enamored and interested and charmed.

The diesel stale air of the city was starting to loosen into spring, a brand new millennium opening like the first page of the fresh moleskin notebook Ciri had bought him for Christmas. These days, Geralt wrote often and freely, journaling the details of his quiet days. Thoughts and feelings and memories. He worked early mornings running street sweepers and had copious time to himself, more time than he knew how to deal with. He walked a whole lot, beneath the street trees opening up with papery flowers, down to the water and back again.

He stepped into the hush of the corner bookstore, bell tinkling, rainbow flag flapping overhead.

“Hello again,” said Regis, perched like a spider on a ladder shelving books, the same thing he always said.

“You gone to lunch yet?” Geralt asked, knowing the answer already, that on restock days the man lost all track of time and sometimes stumbled on a particularly interesting title and flopped himself in his winged armchair behind the register and got stuck there. If Geralt got there with him lost in a book, there was no hope of shaking him out of it, but if he caught him still shelving, he’d slide gracefully off the ladder and flip the open sign to closed and lock up, stroll down to their favorite cafe that boasted a sparkling view of the water from the top deck.

Regis was a bit of a horrible know-it-all and had an irritating habit of sucking his lips back against his teeth before crooning _well actually,_ and he wheezed out laughs at his own jokes with punchlines too obscure for dumb, simple Geralt to grasp and then refused to explain.

Geralt liked him anyway.

“You have to know something about Regis,” Eskel had said not long after the lunch dates, lazy walks, and aimless conversations in the cocoon of the book shop started to become routine. Regis was sober, didn’t go to the bars, so it was like Geralt’s new life split into two different universes. The night time glow of neon and whiskey, and the daytime lull of old books and dry wit. To hear Eskel lean against the bar of the Morhen Pub and say Regis’ name like he was delivering intel felt jarring and strange. “He’s positive, Geralt. He’s an addict. Everyone knows it. Figured you needed to.”

Walking home that night, the moon blurred like a copper penny over the dark rooftops of the buildings, and he sat awake in bed with his moleskin propped on his knees and not writing anything, not thinking anything at all.

He picked up the book he’d bought that afternoon at the bookstore. It was a non-fiction one about steam trains. Didn’t give a fuckin’ hoot about steam trains, but Geralt had said he didn’t like fiction and had asked what book Regis would recommend, something to take him somewhere else. Regis handed him the book about steam trains, eyes gleaming with mirth. That was his stupid idea of a joke, Geralt looking for escapism and Regis giving him trains.

But really, he’d just been hoping to hear Regis talk in that well-spoken, all-knowing tone of his, nose tipped up and sniffing over a scathing critique of one author or another.

Geralt picked up the book about steam trains and cracked it open to the title page, and instead of reading further, he thought about Regis choking on the wet gurgle of his last breaths.

It had been over ten years since Denver. Time chugga-chugged on. Steam trains.

Geralt knew lots of people lived with the virus now, lived with immune systems as strong as a healthy man’s, viral loads so low as to be practically clean. There were regiments to follow and treatments to pursue, cabinets full of a cornucopia of pill bottles, vitamins, exercise, immune boosts. It wasn’t a death sentence. It wasn’t an inevitable domino effect of infections and organ damage and bodily collapse.

He knew, virus or not, Regis was likely to live healthy and hale to an advanced age and die peacefully in his sleep. He knew this and didn’t want to know.

He was thinking something wretched. About the unfairness of it all.

That just a decade on from the red flush of the mountains over Denver, Regis would live. That money and resources and time and chance meant Regis would live, while Jaskier had died.

* * *

Geralt didn’t stop by the bookstore one whole, awful week, chicken-shit scared, belly sour and tense, and then, he remembered what sort of life he was supposed to be living, had promised Jaskier he would keep on living.

He walked down to the corner under a flurry of snowy petals and stood on the sidewalk out front of the bookstore with his hands shoved in his jeans. He didn’t have the balls to go in.

Regis stepped out to him, flipping the open sign to closed, and he swept a flower petal off of Geralt’s shoulder. The corners of his mouth twitched into a smile, and his grey eyes gleamed with a joke only he understood.

“Hello again,” said Regis and opened his gangly arms in the invitation of an embrace. Geralt gave himself over to it, nose tucked into the sweet clove scent of his collar.

“Steam trains book was good,” he said, muffled.

“I know,” said Regis.

“Course you know,” he huffed. “You know everything.”

“Yes.”

Geralt kissed him on the mouth right there in the street, the skies overcast pale and cars rolling past. Regis was polite enough to ignore his damp cheeks.

“See, knew you’d do that,” Regis said, and even though it sure wasn’t all that funny, Geralt laughed.

* * *

  
In June of ‘04, Pride roared over Provincetown like a searing brushfire, louder and more raucous than ever. Their street closed down, banners stretched from building to building, confetti catching the wind, a tempo thumping through the walls of every booth and alley and sidewalk. Somebody taped printouts of Reagan’s ugly mug in all the urinals the block over. Somebody was singing into a microphone, songs of triumph over adversity, songs of a community that soared pheonix-bright out of the charred wreckage of history.

Ciri and Missy drove up from Boston, Junior chubby and doe-eyed on their hips, and Yen showed up with her old friend, Triss. Eskel, wrapped in leather head to toe, hooted and hollered over the rumble of his bike as his gang led the parade, vibrant streamers flapping from his handlebars. Lambert walked sure and steady in eight inch heels, rippling with costume jewelry, sequin-shimmering and brash and smacked a smear of red lipstick to the center of Geralt’s forehead.

New friends and old, blood family and found family, crested in a wave around him. The color and sound overwhelmed and titillated, fiddling on the edge of too much, and his chest half burst with pride and love and gratitude.

He was alive.

Geralt was glad for the eventual ease into stillness and silence as he tiptoed into the apartment above the bookshop, lending his own space down the street to his little family. Regis tucked him into the pillow of his chest and held on tight, old bodies cradled together and old joints easing with an exhausted sigh.

“Long day?” Regis asked, scratching at his scalp, and Geralt hummed, ear pressed flush to his sternum to hear the easy stumble of his heartbeat.

“Had longer,” said Geralt. His lips pecked the swell of the man’s ribs.

“Of course you have."

“Stay with me,” mumbled Geralt, lulled by the thump of the pulse under his cheek.

“To the end,” said Regis and proceeded to do so, year in and year out, to the very last touch of sunlight over the water.

* * *

  
_April 20th, 2010 -_

_Good morning love,_

_Woke this morning feeling like I haven’t written to you in a while. High of 75 today and clear skies. Regis is off on his morning swim (masochistic bastard!), and am on the back porch first time this year. Has been cold and rainy all spring on the coast. Regis been bellyaching about his peonies. Says the rain has ruined any chance of a good bloom this year, but don’t know fuck all about peonies. Not sure you did either. Maybe you would have grown peonies or roses or geraniums or fuck, I don’t know. Jasmine doesn’t grow out here except through the summer, sorry. Knew you always said you loved it._

_Regis says he likes to see a reminder of the seasons. Blooms and cycles. But if he didn’t have the peonies, he wouldn't have to fuss about the bloom getting ruined. Years and years I never had to worry one minute about anything like peonies and now seems like the only worry I’ve got. Something something the ephemeral, fleeting beauty is worth all the heartache. There’s slugs and pissing rain and hail and dry spells and cold snaps but for a little while, sometimes, there’s peonies._

_Guess you taught me a little about all that._

_Anyhow, bet Regis is freezing his tits off. Don’t know how that old coot stands the Atlantic this time of year. You’d have given us all Hell just toeing the water._

_Everyone is well last I heard. Got plans to see the family 4th of July weekend on the Vineyard. Junior is getting big. Yen and Triss got a dog recently, one of those drool factory beasts she always wanted, and Ciri’s settled at the new practice and Missy has an exhibition next month._

_It’s been 20 years now since I lost you. I used to think what it would have been like if you had been able to do this with me, but I don’t wonder about that anymore. You ARE with me. Every time I tell your story, meet some terrified young kid and give them a community to come home to, walk those streets with colors flying, shout your name into the faces of folks who still want to piss on your memory and the memory of others like you… Shit, you’ve got me being an old sap now._

_Maybe you’d be proud. Think I was brave. Damn, love, I hope you’d be proud._

_I sure wish you'd had more time, but in loving you and remembering you, I’ve loved so many people I may have never known or even thought to know. I still tell your story to anyone who will listen. I still can close my eyes and remember the way you looked in the passenger seat of the rig. So young and scared and all mine._

_For now, life is quiet. The road goes on, sure as anything, love. The road goes on._

_Thanks for that._

_Yours,_   
_Geralt_

__  
__

**Author's Note:**

> remember kids: ronald reagan's grave is a gender neutral bathroom and he died during pride month 2004


End file.
